LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – Ecologist Tanya Diamond gets up every morning and checks messages for roadkill sightings. It’s the least fun, but one of the most important parts of her job.

Diamond and her partner, Wildlife Researcher Ahíga Snyder at Pathways for Wildlife regularly conduct roadkill surveys as part of their wildlife connectivity project in the Tahoe Basin. Along with the surveys, they use field cameras, tracking data, GIS habitat suitability modeling and linkage analyses to figure out how and where animals are moving.

Capturing animal and vehicle conflicts are unfortunate events they’ve caught on their field cameras.

Snyder describes one deer they captured stepping out onto a road, “you see the headlights and then see the collision.” He adds, “In their minds, they’re not being actively hunted by the cars.”

Although tragic and hard to watch, the videos, along with roadkill surveys and research help the team inform Caltrans and other local transportation agencies on where to implement wildlife connectivity designs to help animals get where they need to go unharmed.

Diamond says one Caltrans chief keeps the deer collision video on his desktop to show the importance of wildlife crossing structures when receiving pushback.

Some of these designs include culverts, directional fencing as well as overpass planning projects.

The team has captured a near miss in Tahoe where a female bear and her cubs were crossing the road. The mother went first and the cub began following across, but not before a car barely missed the cub.

Snyder says since cubs follow last, it is often the last cub that gets hit.

The team is putting a call out to the community to notify them of roadkill sightings. You can notify them of a sighting on their website pfwildlife.com, Instagram or Facebook page, just type Pathways for Wildlife to search and look for their green emblem.